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Cloudflare’s latest outage caused widespread disruption in cryptocurrency applications, showing the sector’s heavy reliance on centralized Internet infrastructure. As the worst outage of Cloudflare services since 2019, the incident exposed a major contradiction in the cryptocurrency industry’s claims about decentralization and resilience.
This disruption has raised difficult questions: can true decentralization really happen if a single supplier can bring down a large part of the industry?
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Purpose and cause of Cloudflare’s termination
The interruption has begun At 11:20 UTC on November 18thafter changing database permissions that caused a failure in Cloudflare’s network. In its official incident report, Cloudflare explained that the bot’s handler function file doubled in size, exceeding memory limits and resulting in widespread HTTP 5xx errors.
Core Cloudflare services – including CDN, security, Workers KV, Access Authentication, and Control Panel login – experienced a major disruption between 11:20 and 14:30 UTC, with some services partially mitigated by 13:05 and minor issues continuing into the afternoon. All services were fully restored by 17:06 UTC.
The team confirmed that There was no cyber attack responsible for the accident. Instead, it was caused by a configuration change and request behavior that quickly spread throughout the system.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, wrote: “Today was the worst outage for Cloudflare since 2019. We experienced outages that made the control panel unavailable. Some caused new features to be unavailable for a period of time. But in the last 6+ years, we have not experienced another outage that prevents the majority of essential traffic from flowing to our Cloudflare network. Sorry for the pain we have caused. caused on the Internet today.”
Cloudflare plays an important role in routing traffic on the global Internet, as its infrastructure supports a wide range of online services. In the “Browser Market Share Report for the Third Quarter of 2025,” She pointed The company indicates that more than 10% of all websites connect through its reverse proxy system.
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In addition, nearly 25 million properties rely on the Cloudflare network to reach their audience. Since many online platforms rely heavily on their systems, outages or crashes are common It can have long-term consequences.
The paradox of decentralization in digital currencies exposed
When Cloudflare faltered significantly, other exchanges and protocols closed DeFi The house all work at once.
The event drew swift criticism from industry analysts. They point to the gap in the crypto discourse on decentralization and its operational reality.
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Nader Dabit, director of developer relations at Eigen Labs, explained the irony in Manifesto Hon
The outage revealed that many crypto applications rely on centralized networks for basic services. However Blockchains can work Regardless, users access them via the Web2 infrastructure, creating vulnerabilities.
The event also exposed gaps in DeFi risk management. If users cannot access their accounts or perform transactions during critical moments – even when on-chain protocols are still running – the practical reality of unauthorized funding becomes unstable.
However, not all experts saw the incident as an existential threat to Web3. Mitt, CEO of Helius Labs, referred to the outage by putting it in context by comparing the massive scale of Cloudflare to the amount of blockchain.
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This perspective illustrates the future engineering challenge. While the blockchain industry values uptime positively, few projects handle traffic that matches Cloudflare’s scale.
Finding decentralized systems of similar capabilities has not yet been resolved. Currently, Web3 projects rely on existing centralized infrastructures for practical reasons.
Some analysts have suggested that disruption can encourage innovation. Alex Svanevic, a blockchain data expert, noted that the outage can promote solutions Alternative encryption architecture.
Industry leaders must face the question of whether the cryptocurrency sector will diversify or continue to rely on convention over ideology, as they evaluate security and solidity.
